phone call

 I got a phone call this morning as I was sewing borders to the bottom quilt from a lady who will be bringing me 'a lot' of fabric next week.  Normally I get a call about once a month or so from someone who wants to donate fabric but this summer has been over the top.  I've received about ten large donations of fabric.  This lady was the second one to say that she tried contacting the local Project Linus and they didn't want her donation.  Even though we have a lot of fabric, I could never imagine telling someone to thanks.

 Several years ago, we got a donation from another Binky Patrol chapter that closed down.  The lady who ran that group had to be the most organized person alive.  Every piece of fabric was measured, folded and sorted into boxes by size and color.  They gave us 1,500 yards of fabric and it took us just about 2 years to work through all of that fabric.  So, when someone says they have a lot of fabric, I let them know we make a lot of quilts.  It may take us a couple of years to work through all that we have now, but if we stopped taking donations, we would run out and then couldn't make and give away so many quilts.  Have you ever been to a quilt shop and purchased fabric for one quilt?  When my mother in law got cancer, I bought fabric just for her quilt.  It was over $80 just for the fabric for the quilt top and that was a lap size quilt.  I'm thankful there are people out there willing to share in their wealth with kids who are hurting.

I've been working through the fabric donations this summer and as long as I can put some time in when the fabric comes in and don't just let it pile up in bags in the garage, I can get it out to people to sew into tops and then hopefully get at least 5 quilts done a week once school gets started again.  The road work is supposed to be finished August 4, which means my commute will be 20 minutes shorter each way this year.  Those 40 extra minutes can be spent quilting :) (or cleaning or grading or something more productive than driving to and from work!)

My little guy is enjoying Robotics Camp.  He says it is confusing (which means he is having to think!) because it requires everything to be perfect for the program to work just right. You have to have the right angle and distance and direction in the program for the robot to go where you want it to go.  It will only follow the direction you give it.  While waiting for me to pick him up, he was learning how to play chess.  The teachers (friends of my son from his robotics class at high school) made the chess pieces with the 3D printer at the shop.